At the beginning of March I had the pleasure of heading down to Pasadena, California for SCaLE 15x. Just like last year, MJ also came down for work so it was fun syncing up with him here and there between going off to our respective meetings and meals.

I arrived the evening on March 1st and went out with my co-organizer of the Open Source Infrastructure Day to pick up some supplies for the event. I hope to write up a toolkit for running one of these days based on our experiences and what we needed to buy, but that will have to wait for another day.

I also spent an hour over at the UbuCon Summit giving a talk on Xubuntu which I already blogged about here. Throughout the day I also handled the Twitter accounts for both @OpenSourceInfra and @ubuntu_us_ca. This was deceptively exhausting, by Thursday night I was ready to crash but we had a dinner to go to! Speakers, organizers and other key folks who were part of our Open Source Infrastructure day were treated to a meal by IBM.

Keynotes for the conference on Saturday and Sunday were both thoughtful, future-thinking talks about the importance of open source software, culture and methodologies in our world today. On Saturday we heard from Astrophysicist Christine Corbett Moran, who among her varied accomplishments has done research in Antarctica and led security-focused development of the now wildly popular Signal app for iOS. She spoke on the relationships between our development of software and the communities we’re building in the open. There is much to learn and appreciate in this process, but also more that we can learn from other communities. Slides from her talk, amusingly constructed as a series of tweets (some real, most not) are available as a pdf on the talk page.

Christine Corbett Moran on “Open Source Software as Activism”

In Karen Sandler’s keynote she looked at much of what is going on in the United States today and seriously questioned her devotion to free software when it seems like there are so many other important causes out there to fight for. She came back to free software though, since it’s such an important part of every aspect of our lives. As technologists, it’s important for us to continue our commitment to open source and support organizations fighting for it, a video of her talk is already available on YouTube at SCaLE 15x Keynote: Karen Sandler – In the Scheme of Things, How Important is Software Freedom?

A few other talks really stood out for me, Amanda Folson spoke on “10 Things I Hate About Your API” where she drew from her vast experience with hosted APIs to give advice to organizations who are working to build their customer and developer communities around a product. She scrutinized things like sign-up time and availability and complexity of code examples. She covered tooling problems, documentation, reliability and consistency, along with making sure the API is actually written for the user, listening to feedback from users to maintain and improve it, and abiding by best practices. Best of all, she also offered helpful advice and solutions for all these problems! The great slides from her talk are available on the talk page.

Amanda Folson

I also really appreciated VM Brasseur’s talk, “Passing the Baton: Succession planning for FOSS leadership”. I’ll admit right up front that I’m not great at succession planning. I tend to take on a lot in projects and then lack the time to actually train other people because I’m so overwhelmed. I’m not alone in this, succession planning is a relatively new topic in open source projects and only a handful have taken a serious look at it from a high, project-wide level. Key points she made centered around making sure skills for important roles are documented and passed around and suggested term limits for key roles. She walked attendees through a process of identifying critical roles and responsibilities in their community, refactoring roles that are really too large for individual contributors, and procedures and processes for knowledge transfer. I think one of the most important things about this talk was less about the “bus factor” worry of losing major contributors unexpectedly, but how documenting and making sure roles are documented makes your project more welcoming to new, and more divers contributors. Work is well-scoped, so it’s easy for someone new to come in and help on a small part, and the project has support built in for that.

VM Brasseur

For my part, I gave a talk on “Listening to the Needs of Your Global Open Source Community” where I had a small audience (last talk of the day, against a popular speaker) but an engaged one that had great questions. It’s nice sometimes nice to have a smaller crowd that allows you to talk to almost all of them after the talk, I even arranged a follow-up lunch meeting with a woman I met who is doing some work similar to what I did for the i18n team in the OpenStack community. Slides from my talk are here (7.4M PDF).

I heard a talk from AB Periasamy of Minio, the open source alternative to AWS S3 that we’re using at Mesosphere for some of our DC/OS demos that need object storage. My friend and open source colleague Nathan Handler also gave a very work-applicable talk on PaaSTA, the framework built by Yelp to support their Apache Mesos-driven infrastructure. I cover both of these talks in more depth in a blog post coming out soon on the dcos.io blog. Edit: The post on the DC/OS blog is now up: Reflecting on SCaLE 15x.

SCaLE 15x remains one of my favorite conferences. Lots of great talks, key people from various segments of open source communities I participate in and great pacing so that you can find time to socialize and learn. Huge thanks to Ilan Rabinovitch who I worked with a fair amount during this event to make sure the Open Source Infrastructure day came together, and to the fleet of volunteers who make this happen every year.

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